Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025
Click here for an audio of the sermon
Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter, after the Ascension and before Pentecost. This Sunday marks an in-between time: we are invited by St. Luke’s Gospel and Acts into the experience of the Apostles and the earliest Church. We are invited into the absence of the resurrected Lord from our physical midst and the not quite knowing what is coming next. Luke frames this as a sequence of events, and his account has provided a narrative framework for the Church’s self understanding ever since: the death of Jesus, his resurrection and ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, provide a calendar sequence which has become our proclamation, but even more, has become an identity for us. This sequence of events has refashioned the followers of Jesus into the Church. And we are invited in so that we can participate in the new life Christ has brought to the world. In other words, in this view, we have our own lives and these events have their own life, both ourselves and these events independent and self-contained. In proclaiming them the Church faces the world with the choice to participate. Or not. But in this view, it and we are separate, needing to be brought together . The connection between ourselves and the redemptive activity of Jesus is accomplished through individual faith and through joining the community of faith, but we always in some sense remain separate beings: the self and the faith, the self and the Church, the self and Jesus, the self and God. This is our normative reality in the lived life of the Christian community. It is the understanding of the self and the faith in Mark, Matthew and Luke.
This understanding of the self as a more or less stand-alone entity is seemingly rooted in a common-sense understanding of our own reality: We are what we are and they are what they are. The Church presents the objective events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as a pattern for our faith and inner conversion. She invites us to place ourselves within those saving, objective events of Jesus. But this is not the only path presented to us in the earliest Church. John’s gospel has a somewhat different understanding of who we are in the face of God’s invitation of love, identity and transformation. Not in contradiction but in perspective.
The narrative of the resurrection sequence of events in John is slightly different. For one thing, Jesus invites the Spirit into the community of believers again and again during his earthly ministry. And the Pentecost event happens in the first gathering of the disciples:
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
[John 20:19-22]
No fifty days, no Ascension, no upper room. Lurking in the background of John’s telling are the Genesis stories of creation: God’s act of the creation of human beings is to breathe the breath of life into our nostrils. Jesus breathes on his disciples and they receive the Holy Spirit. And I cannot help but think of that other Genesis detail of creation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” [Gen 1:1-2] By directing the ever-hovering Holy Spirit to the disciples and by breathing the breath of new life into them, Jesus is beginning a new creation: his disciples are that new creation, that new world.
But having evoked the creation story, our restless minds, so unavoidably centered on our own situations, will fairly quickly begin to ask the next question: What about us? The Genesis creation story did not have a happy ending for us. Our first parents, or so the story goes, lost the thread, missed the point, went off on their own tangent, ignored their elemental, existential, ontological connection to their Creator, and broke that connection. Their willful separation from God is their Original Sin, and whatever we may think of the Genesis account as a factual narrative, in fact it vividly describes our reality: We too seem to be separated from God.
And here is where our Gospel for today enters the picture. In John’s convoluted way he is showing us the path back. I in them and Thou in Me: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” Jesus’ human work is to bring together followers who find new life in him. His divine work is to make of those who follow him a new creation, a new humanity, no longer separated from God but now filled with and joined to the Father’s life through his Son Jesus Christ. A new creation that can credibly witness to the God who made the world and loves it.
This seems easy to say: a new creation. But perhaps not so easy to do. How can we possibly make the leap from our existential separation from God, from our fallen nature, into unity through Christ in the Father? Through the words and acts of Jesus, John simply states that it is possible, and urges us to do so. And truly, we want to. But how complex that proves to be! So complex, we have to begin again. As St. Paul says, “ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” [Gal 2:20] We are invited to join this new creation, no longer separate from God but in order to live continually in the Father’s loving creativity, to love in the Son’s world-embracing heart, to act in the Spirit’s restless energy, we have to die to our present, separated selves. Our created purpose is to live, to love and to act in God, and so to accomplish that purpose we must consciously join ourselves to God’s life. But as we discover as each of our days unfolds, this is no simple matter. Or rather, simple in its intention but infinite in its application.
To this process Christian traditional spiritual practice has given a name: theosis: The process of uniting ourselves to God, inviting God in, giving ourselves to God, acting in God, resting in God, becoming one with God: “so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” When I first heard of theosis as a concept as a younger person, my good sturdy Protestant soul rebelled. Heresy! How can I become God? The very thought is repugnant. I am me. I can with great effort try to be godly but I can only approach God with fear and trembling, taking account of my very deep separation from God, my inadequacies and my failures and my sins, so very, very many of them. But as I have grown older I have come to realize that the “I” I thought was so separate is in fact deeply contingent: my body has its own unavoidable, ineluctable connections to the physical world. We are all part of that world and it is madness to act as though we are separate from its energies, its processes, its laws. Our assumptions about the world and other people are permanently part and parcel of the culture we were born into, with its wisdoms born of the ages, but also with its blindnesses and its prejudices, Our minds themselves are not always “our own”, but are, as we are increasingly discovering, products of physical, electrical, chemical and genetic processes.
And so it is true of all of us: We think we are independent, separate, standing on our own two feet, but in fact, at every step we are by our very nature one with others: Others conceive us in the womb. Others bear us into this world, feed and clean and clothe and support and teach us. With others we all cooperate to support each other in producing what we need to live. In the course of time, we ourselves also are called to cooperate to help create and nurture the next generations. So in fact, John’s vision of Oneness in God is not strange at all, but profoundly natural. We are already one with nature and one with each other. Oneness is what we are. John begins his Gospel with another reference to creation: “In the beginning was the Word ... All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Separation of creation from God was creation’s denial of its own true nature. In our own separateness we deny our true nature. In this Oneness, this theosis, we are simply invited to return to what we are: Created through the Word to show forth in our own unique human way the creative energy of God’s love. Our uniqueness as a species is that we are the conscious witnesses to that great Goodness. Our choice is whether or not to live no longer to ourselves alone but embedded and embraced in the love of God. That choice is our Glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment